Mozilla launches new company focused on email

On the heels of Yahoo acquiring Zimbra and the $10 million fbFund for Facebook developers, the Mozilla Foundation launching a new company, with $3 million in seed funding, aimed at developing communications software and an ecosystem based on the Thunderbird email product, code and brand.

David Ascher, currently CTO and VP Engineering of ActiveState, is joining Mozilla to head up the new company.

Earlier this month the first beta of the “Penelope” open source Eudora client, which is based on Thunderbird, was released, with a hope of giving the Mozilla email client additional market momentum.